The free and entirely uncurbed enjoyed an unusual treat. It had a sensation which did not need to be supported by a hectic imagination or a lurid vocabulary. Vedder Court had been condemned for the use of the Municipal Transportation Company! A new eight track, double-deck tube was to be constructed through Crescent Island to the mainland!

Grand climax! Through this tube and into Vedder Court, at the platforms of the surface and L and subway cars, was to come the passenger trains of the new Atlantic-Pacific Railroad, a line three hundred miles shorter than any now stretching between Broadway and the Golden Gate! Any reader of the daily press, of whom there are several, knows precisely what the free and entirely uncurbed did with this bit of simon-pure information. The glittering details began on the first page, turned on the second, continued on the fourth, jumped over to the seventh, and finished back among the real estate ads. It began early in the morning, and it continued until late at night, fresh details piling upon each other in mad profusion, their importance limited only by the restrictions of type!

Extra! The trick by which the A.-P. ran through the mountains over the Inland Pacific’s track!

Extra, extra! The compulsion by which the Midcontinent was brought to complete the big gap in the new A.-P. system!

Tremendous extra! The contracts of freightage, subject strictly to the Inter-State Commerce law, between the A.-P. and the cereal trust, the metal trust, the fuel trust, the cloth trust, and all the other iniquitous combinations in restraint of everything! Wow! Zowie! That was the hot one! The A.-P. was the main stem, and within thirteen seconds of the appearance on the streets of the tremendous extra, every other fragile branchlet of a railroad not under the immediate protection of the A.-P., was reduced to a shrivel, and its stocks began to drop with the sickening plunge of an unopened parachute!

Gail Sargent kept Nanette on the rush for extras from the first yell on the streets, and she read every word, including the underlines on the miscellaneous portraits of Allison and the funny pi-lines which invariably occurred in the middle of the most interesting sentences.

It was true, all true! Here was the first step in Allison’s tremendous project an accomplished fact. The rest of it would be gradually revealed, from day to day, as suited his needs, and the empire he had planned would spread, until its circles touched, and overlapped, and broke into an intricate webbing, over all the land and water of the earth! And she was to be the Empress!

Was she? Through all the night she had battled that question, and the battle had left traces of darkness around her luminous eyes. First, she had been in the swirl of his tremendous compulsion, overwhelmed by the sheer physical force of him, captured not by siege but by sortie. Then had come the dazzling splendour of his great plan, a temptation of power, of might, of unlimited rulership, in the spoils of which, and the honour of which, and the glory of which, she would share. Next, in the midst of her expanding anticipation, there had come, as out of a clear sky, a sudden inexplicable fear. It was a shrinking, almost like a chill, which had attacked her. Allison himself! The sheer physical dominance of him; the tempestuous mastery of him; and again she felt that breathless sensation of utter helplessness which she had experienced in the little lookout house. It was as if he were pulling the very life out of her, to the upbuilding of his own strength! It was in the very nature of him to sweep her away by storm; it was a part of his very bigness. He was colossal, gigantic, towering! And she had conquered this giant, had been the motive of his strength, the very pinnacle of his cloud-topping ambition! There was pride in that, pride and to spare. It distressed her that again and again came that impulse of fear, that shrinking. A new thought dawned. Perhaps this was the thing which she had desired, the thing for which she had been waiting; to be taken, and crushed.

Another disturbance came to her. This mighty plan of Allison’s. The exaltation of achievement, the dazzling glory of accomplishment, had blinded her to the processes by which the end must be gained, and the fact which drew her attention to this was the remembrance that her Uncle Jim was to be protected! What about the others? For Allison to gain control and dominion over thousands of now segregated interests, those thousands must lose their own control. What would become of them?

Pshaw! That was the way of the world, particularly of the commercial world. As her father had often expressed it, the big fish ate the little fish because fish was the only food for fish; and Allison was the biggest one of them all. That was the way of him; to devour that he might live. Even here, far from him, and safe in her dainty little chintz hung suite, she felt the dominance of him. Turn her eyes where she would, with the lids open or closed, he filled her vision, not in his normal stature, but grown to the dimensions of his force, filling the sky, the earth, the sea, blotting out everything! There was no escaping him. He had come to claim her, and she belonged to him; that is, unless she chose to call upon a strength still latent in her. There was a something else which she could not define just now, which seemed to call to her persistently through the darkness. A voice—but the typo for colossus stood between! She wondered if she were happy. She wondered what her Aunt Helen would say. Bigness and power and dominance; she had admired them all her life.

Late in the afternoon Jim Sargent came home, drawn, fagged, and with hollows under his eyes. He had a violent headache, and he looked ten years older. He walked slowly into the library where Mrs. Sargent and Mrs. Davies and Gail were discussing the future of Vedder Court, and dropped into a chair.

Grace Sargent rang a bell instantly. When Jim felt that way, he needed a hot drink first of all.

“What is the matter?” she asked him, the creases of worry flashing into her brow.

“It’s been a hard day,” he explained, forcing himself, with an effort, to answer. Years of persistent experience had taught him to follow the line of least resistance. “There has been a panic on ’Change. Railroads are going to smash all up and down the line. Allison’s new A.-P. road. It’s the star piracy of the century. Allison has brought into the railroad game the same rough-shod methods he used in his traction manipulations.”

“Has your company been hurt, Jim?” asked his wife, fully prepared for the worst, and making up her mind to bear up bravely under it.

“Not yet,” replied Sargent, and he passed his hand over his brow. He was already making a tremendous effort to brace himself for to-morrow’s ordeal. “I escaped to-day by an accident. By some mistake the Towando Valley was mentioned as belonging to the new A.-P. combination. Of course I didn’t correct it, but by to-morrow they’ll know.”

“Mr. Allison was responsible for that statement,” Gail serenely informed her uncle. “He promised he’d take care of you.”

“Great guns!” exploded her uncle. “What did you know about this thing?”

“All of it,” smiled Gail. She had known that Allison would keep his word, but it gave her a strange sense of relief that he had done so.

Her Aunt Helen turned to her with a commanding eye; but Gail merely dimpled.

“Of course I couldn’t say anything,” went on Gail. “It was all in confidence. Isn’t it glorious, Uncle Jim!”

“You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d been down town to-day,” responded her uncle, trying again to erase from his brow the damage which had been done to his nerves. “They wanted to mob Allison! He has cut the ground from under the entire railroad business of the United States! Their stocks have deflated an aggregate of billions of dollars, and the slump is permanent! He has bankrupted a host of men, rifled the pockets of a million poor investors; he has demoralised the entire transportation commerce of the United States; and he gave no one the show of a rat in a trap!”

“Isn’t that business?” asked Gail, the red spots beginning to come into her cheeks.

“Not quite!” snapped her Uncle Jim. “Fiction has made that the universal idea, but there are decent men in business. The majority of them are, even in railroading. Most roads are organised and conducted for the sole purpose of carrying freight and passengers at a profit for the stockholders, and spectacular stock jobbing deals are the exception rather than the rule.”

“Has Mr. Allison been more unfair than others who have made big consolidations?” demanded Gail, again aware of the severely inquiring eye of Aunt Helen.

“Rotten!” replied her uncle, with an emphasis in which there was much of personal feeling. “He has taken tricky advantage of every unprotected loophole. He won from the Inland Pacific, at the mere cost of trackage, a passage which the Inland built through the mountains by brilliant engineering and at an almost countless cost.”

“Isn’t that accounted clever?” asked Gail.

“So is the work of a confidence man or a wire-tapper!” was the retort. “But they are sent to jail just the same. The Inland created something. It built, with brains and money and force, and sincere commercial enterprise, a line which won it a well-earned supremacy of the Pacific trade. It was entitled to keep it; yet Allison, by making with it a tricky contract for the restricted use of the key to its supremacy, uses that very device to destroy it. He has bankrupted, or will have done so, a two thousand mile railroad system, which is of tremendous commercial value to the country, in order to use a hundred miles of its track and remove it from competition! Allison has created nothing. He has only seized, by stealth, what others have created. He is not even a commercial highwayman. He is a commercial pickpocket!”

Gail had paled by now.

“Tell me one thing,” she demanded. “Wouldn’t any of the railroad men have employed this trick if they had been shrewd enough to think of it?”

“A lot of them,” was the admission, after an awkward pause. “Does that make it morally and ethically correct?”

“You may be prejudiced, Jim,” interpolated Aunt Helen, moving closer to Gail. “If they are all playing the game that way, I don’t see why Mr. Allison shouldn’t receive applause for clever play.”

“You bet I’m prejudiced!” snarled Sargent, overcoming his weariness and pacing up and down the library floor. “He came near playing my road the same trick he did the Inland Pacific. He secured control of the L. and C., because it has a twenty-year contract for passage over fifty miles of our track. He’d throw the rest of our line away like a peanut hull, if he had not promised Gail to protect me. I’m an object of charity!”

“Oh!” It was a scarcely audible cry of pain. Aunt Helen moved closer, and patted her hand. Gail did not notice the action.

“Why did he make you that promise, Gail?” demanded her uncle, turning on her suddenly, with a physical motion so much like her father’s that she was startled.

“He wants me to marry him,” faltered Gail.

Aunt Grace sat down by the other side of Gail.

“Have you accepted him, dear?” she asked.

There was a lump in Gail’s throat. She could not answer!

“She’ll never marry him with my consent!” stormed her Uncle Jim. “Nor with Miles’s! The fellow’s an unscrupulous scoundrel! He’s made of cruelty from his toes to his hair! He stops at nothing! He even robbed Market Square Church of six million dollars!”

Gail’s head suddenly went up in startled inquiry. She wanted to still defend Allison; but she dreaded what was to come.

“We wouldn’t sell him Vedder Court at his price; so he took it from us at six million less than he originally offered. He did that by a trick, too.”

All three women looked up at him in breathless interest.

“He had the city condemn Vedder Court,” went on Sargent. “If he had condemned it outright for the Municipal Transportation Company, he would have had to pay us about the amount of his original offer; but his own private and particular devil put the idea into his head that the Vedder Court tenements should be torn down anyhow, for the good of the public! So he had the buildings condemned first, destroying six million dollars’ worth of value; then he had the ground condemned! Tim Corman probably got about a million dollars for that humanitarian job!”

A wild fit of sobbing startled them all.